ByrneWallace

ByrneWallace, one of Ireland’s best-known full-service law firms, has always looked ahead to how technology can provide a strategic advantage. But as IT becomes more mission critical, and a growing competitive differentiator, the law firm decided to consolidate IT vendors for better service and efficiency.

Continuing a multi-year trend of double-digit growth, ByrneWallace today has more than 320 staff in its Dublin offices. But with a slim in-house IT team, continuing to support the growing organisation with effective and above all secure IT services is an increasing challenge. The solution was simple, said Head of IT, John Kelly,

“We needed to consolidate our IT partnerships. Having multiple IT vendors no longer worked for our business. Particularly we needed a partner who has ISO 27001 certification.”

ByrneWallace was the first Irish law firm certified to this standard, recognising early on the increasing digital aspect of client information management and the business assurance that certification would provide.

Arkphire holds the demanding ISO 27001 and is already ByrneWallace’s trusted Cisco Gold partner, providing a full unified communications infrastructure to the law firm, as well as facilitating its recent connectivity upgrade to 10Gbps. As ByrneWallace looks to consolidate, it’s now examining how Arkphire could take on additional enterprise infrastructure responsibilities, including compute and engineering support.

The business drivers for ByrneWallace to keep its technology top-notch are several, including the continued competitive pressure on Ireland’s talent pool. To attract and retain the millennials who make up the bulk of the incoming talent at ByrneWallace, John says that robust, fit-for-purpose enterprise infrastructure that can support the most innovative technology to enable our mobile workforce is vital.

“Our connectivity upgrade was a big step, because it supports remote and mobile working for staff during commutes or while working at home, but there’s also a huge hardware element to equipping our staff,” he says. “That’s why we’ll soon be piloting desktop virtualisation, to break that dependency on hardware and let staff work remotely from any device, rather than requiring a dedicated, hardened laptop.”

It’s initiatives like these, John says, that make it so important to work with IT partners like Arkphire who can keep him abreast of enterprise solutions that can deliver flexibility and innovation, within the constraints of an IT budget that isn’t growing as fast as the organisation itself.

“I do get that comfort level when I speak with Arkphire: my account manager meets with me regularly, lets me know about renewals and end-of-life devices, but also just chats to me about technology trends that are coming down the line, and additional capabilities Arkphire can provide in the enterprise infrastructure space.” he says. ”That’s really important for us, being kept abreast of trends and given access to specialists with skills that we don’t have in house. We get a sense of being in safe hands with Arkphire, and that’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

What does Arkphire do for ByrneWallace?

All Cisco and networking services including unified communications infrastructure

Proactive support and advice on renewals and end-of-life network components requiring replacement